The Edelweiss Sisters: An epic, heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 novel

by Kate Hewitt

  Carefully Johanna set her cup back on its saucer, it was part of the dinner set of Hutschenreuther china her parents had received as a wedding present; each precious plate and cup her mother’s pride and joy. “I want to do something,” she said.

  “Do something? You aren’t busy enough? Shall I give you more of the sewing, the stitching, the cleaning, the baking? There is always more work to do, Johanna. If I had known you were so restless, I would have offered you more.” Her mother shook her head and then finished her coffee, the conversation clearly over, needing no more words.

  “I mean something else, Mama.” Johanna strove to keep her tone measured.

  “And what else is there?”

  “Mama… surely…” She stared at her mother in frustration. “You know I’m not married.”

  “Pfft. You’ll meet someone one day.”

  How, Johanna wondered. She could not herd goats down the Getreidegasse like her mother had back in the mountains, and there were no longer any eligible men at St. Blasius, where they attended mass every Sunday. In the last few years, the three potential suitors at church had all left—one to Vienna, one to be a priest, and one to become a school teacher. She didn’t go anywhere else than home or church, not any more. There was no way to meet anyone.

  A few years ago she’d been part of Naturfreunde, an Alpine club for young people that had sponsored hikes up the Monschsberg and Untersberg, treks through the Salzkammergut. Once there had even been a skiing trip.

  Johanna recalled spending the night in one of the crude mountain huts, its tiny windows heaped with snow drifts; she had cooked sausages over a fire and stayed up late, chatting and laughing with some of the girls in the club. There had been a boy—a man, really, a few years older than her—who had smiled at her when she’d been strapping on her skis. Later, after she’d bumbled down a hill, he’d skied up next to her and offered to carry her skis up for another run. Disconcerted, she had declined, and he hadn’t offered again. And yet still the memory had the power to make Johanna’s heart beat a little faster.

  But Naturfreunde, along with all of Austria’s other clubs and societies, had been disbanded two years ago, with the inception of the Ständestaat, the one-party system of the Federal State of Austria. Her father soberly claimed it had been a necessary step to keep Austria strong enough to resist Nazi aggression, but Johanna missed the treks in the mountains, the hope of something more.

  “It isn’t just that,” she told her mother, determined to persevere despite Hedwig’s stony expression. “It is… life, Mama! I don’t want to spend all of it in your kitchen.”

  Her mother jerked back, her weathered face crumpling in hurt before she stood up, briskly collecting their cups and saucers, even though Johanna had not yet finished her coffee.

  “I did not realize it was such a torment,” she said in a voice stiff with affront. The cups and saucers rattled in her hands as she put them in the sink with more force than she would normally use with her precious porcelain.

  “It’s not a torment,” Johanna said, fighting a sense of both despair and anger. “But I want my own home one day, my own kitchen.” My own life, she thought. “If I have some skills…” She tried for a different tack. “Women will need to work, you know, if there’s going to be a war.”

  “Going to be a war!” Hedwig whirled around, her expression turning thunderous. “Johanna, there is not going to be a war.”

  Unlike her mother, Johanna read the newspapers, both the Salzburger Volksblatt and the Wiener Neueste Nachrichten from Vienna. She read about how many Austrians wanted to be part of Deutschland, the Greater Germany; she also read how Germany had marched into the Rhineland unimpeded in March, to begin to make that ill wish a reality. Hitler was rearming unabashedly, even if people pretended not to notice. And the gangs of brown-shirted boys that roamed Salzburg had grown in both size and number, their direct stares far more challenging than they’d been just two years ago.

  Johanna had sometimes eyed those young men with covert curiosity; there was something invigorating and even exciting about their brash swaggering, their blond confidence. She knew her father despised Hitler and all his slavish followers, but Johanna thought there was nothing slavish about the way those young men strode down a street as if they owned it.

  “Why would you talk of war?” Hedwig grumbled as she began to bang pots about in preparation for their evening meal. “It has not been so long since the last one.”

  “Almost twenty years.”

  “And look what happened.” Hedwig flung an arm out to encompass the house, the city, the world. “Everything fell apart. Everything!”

  Johanna’s father often lamented the loss of the world he’d grown up in, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire had stretched from Switzerland to Russia, and had encompassed fifty million people, encouraging freedom of movement, thought, and belief. Now the Federal State of Austria was, according to Manfred Eder, no more than a basket of scraps, the parts of the empire that no one else had wanted cobbled together to form a country, and run with an iron hand to keep it intact.

  “Where is our identity as a nation, our culture as a people?” he would sometimes ask, when he gathered his friends in their front sitting room, an informal salon of Christian Social Party members and war veterans who talked of politics and religion, and longed to change the world.

  To Johanna they were just a bunch of disillusioned old men, lamenting a world that no longer existed over their brandy and cigars. All she’d known was this—a small country, not an empire, a provincial town that tried to be a cosmopolitan city every summer during the festival. And the kitchen. Always the kitchen.

  She sighed, knowing she needed to placate her mother if she wanted the smallest hope of achieving her own modest aim. “Even if there isn’t a war… the world is changing, Mama, in many ways. I only want to learn useful skills.” Hedwig did not reply and Johanna added, unable to keep a belligerent note from her voice, “If Lotte can study music, why can I not learn how to type?”

  Hedwig made a dismissive sound, her back to Johanna, rigid and unyielding. From downstairs the bell jangled as someone came into the shop, and she heard her father’s cheerful tone as he greeted the prospective customer.

  Oh, this life, Johanna thought, it never changes. Day in and day out, always the same—cooking, cleaning, stitching, sewing. She would live and die in this kitchen, and nothing would ever happen to her.

  “You haven’t given me a real reason why not,” she declared, and Hedwig whirled around, bringing her hands down hard on the table, the loud sound reverberating through the room.

  “What reason must I give? You are needed here, and there is no money for more schooling. Da Gscheidere gibt noch!” The smarter one gives in: a command to stop being so stubborn.

  Johanna looked away, fighting the urge to snap something back. It would do her no good, and yet she couldn’t give up. Not yet. “I could pay the fees back,” she finally said, hating that her voice had turned wheedling. Weak. “After I’d found a job.”

  “A job, a job!” Hedwig threw her hands up in the air. “You have a job. Here.” She gestured to the table, and then heaved a heavy sack of dirty potatoes onto it, giving Johanna a pointed look. “They need to be peeled.”

  Silently Johanna rose from her seat and grabbed a knife. Hedwig turned back to her pots as she began to peel the potatoes, the only sound the angry scritch scritch of the knife against the peel that came away in long, dirt-speckled curls. Both women bristled with hostility.

  From downstairs came a burst of laughter, then the jangle and clang of the door shutting on another satisfied customer. The air in the kitchen felt thick and heavy with ill feeling. Scritch scritch.

  Then, after five minutes of interminable silence, a knock sounded, this one on the side door for family visitors that led directly upstairs. Johanna put down her knife.

  “I’ll get it.” She hurried from the room, grateful for a reprieve, no matter how brief, from the oppressive atmospher
e. Would Mother ever relent? She would have to think of another way. Something, somehow; she would make her change her mind.

  “Oh, it’s you.” Johanna could not keep an unwelcome note from her voice as she stared at Janos Panov, the knife grinder who visited all the houses and shops on Getreidegasse every few weeks with his grinding cart, colorfully painted and decorated with ragged bunting. His dirty cap was jammed onto his greasy hair, and his smile revealed a set of broken, tobacco-stained teeth.

  “Hello, Fräulein Eder.” His tone was ingratiating, and while Johanna usually felt pity for him, now she only felt irritation as she gritted her teeth.

  “We don’t need any knives sharpened today,” she said, even though she knew her mother would be cross. They always needed knives sharpened, but in her current mood she could not bear to humor the simple-minded knife grinder for even a few minutes. His hangdog expression and ingratiating manner reminded her of all she would miss if her mother wouldn’t agree to her scheme—this was the only man she ever exchanged pleasantries with.

  “Are you certain, Fräulein?” he asked. “It has been two weeks, after all.”

  “I’m certain,” Johanna snapped, and then she closed the door in his face. She took a deep breath and then let it out slowly. For a second, tears threatened, and she blinked them back. She would not cry. She would not show such weakness, even if only to herself.

  Hedwig came to the top of the stairs, one hand resting on her lower back, her stolid figure silhouetted by the fading sunlight from the kitchen. “Who was at the door?”

  “Just the knife grinder,” Johanna answered dismissively, anger and frustration, and worse, a deeper despair, still pulsing through her. She turned from the door as she blinked back the last of her tears. “That idiot Jew.”

  “Johanna!” Her father’s voice, sharp with both hurt and dismay, made her stiffen. “How can you say such a thing?”

  Manfred stood in the doorway to his shop, looking stooped and sad, his brown eyes full of sorrow.

  “Well, he is,” Johanna said defiantly, even as her cheeks began to burn. She knew she shouldn’t have said it, she wished she hadn’t, but the words had tumbled out along with her frustration. “He spits tobacco and he smells,” she declared. “I don’t like him.”

  “He is a fellow human being,” Manfred stated quietly. “And our Lord and Savior was a Jew. They are God’s chosen people, Johanna. Never forget it.”

  “It was just the knife grinder,” Johanna exclaimed. “Even Mama finds him dirty. Why do you care?”

  Manfred was silent for a moment, the corners of his mouth drawn down in a look so sorrowful Johanna squirmed inside as she clenched her hands into fists to keep from twisting them in her apron. Why had her father had to hear her? She hadn’t meant it, of course she hadn’t; she usually felt sorry for Janos. She’d been speaking thoughtlessly, but what did it even matter? Most people said far worse about the Jews.

  “I care because there is much evil in this world,” her father finally said quietly, “and I know it can be easy to forget it.”

  Johanna shook her head, unsure if she didn’t understand, or she simply didn’t want to. “Besides,” her father continued, “Janos Panov was born into a poor family and orphaned at a young age, driven from Russia by ignorant people who hated him simply for who he was. He had no opportunity to educate or better himself. He has worked hard and found a way to earn his keep. For that alone he deserves our respect.” He paused. “If he has done anything to upset you—”

  “Oh, he hasn’t,” Johanna cried impatiently. “But it doesn’t matter. None of it matters.”

  Her father took a step towards her, the look on his face one of utter seriousness. “But it does matter, Johanna, mein schatz. It matters very much. And my greatest fear in these troubled times is that it will seem to stop mattering, when it never can. Do you understand?”

  Johanna stared at him, the slump of his slight shoulders, the earnest yet serious look in his kindly eyes, the sad smile that curved his mouth. He looked frail, yet he had an inner strength that she realized she had always relied on.

  “Johanna?”

  She nodded, unable to fully meet his gaze. “I understand.”

  Manfred regarded her for another moment, the probing look in his eyes making Johanna think of Father Josef when she gave her confession, the glint of the priest’s eyes barely visible behind the latticed screen. “Very well,” he said softly, sounding accepting but unconvinced.

  Unable to bear his scrutiny any longer, Johanna turned away and hurried upstairs. Her mother gave her a grim nod of solidarity as Johanna came into the kitchen and picked up her knife.

  Chapter Three

  Birgit

  September 1936

  “The trouble with Austria,” the wheezy voice of Hans Pichler declared before erupting into a fit of coughing, “is that she is a country without a culture, a nation made of disparate parts, the remnants of an empire.”

  This pronouncement was followed by another bout of coughing while the handful of other men gathered in the Eders’ sitting room nodded sagely in agreement.

  Birgit had heard it all before. Once or twice a month her father gathered his compatriots around him—war veterans like himself, as well as men from church or like-minded members of the Christian Social party who had reluctantly accepted Austria’s newest government, the fascist Fatherland Front, as the only way to combat the unreserved aggression of the National Socialists.

  They talked of books, of art and music, religion and philosophy, and then, inevitably, the discussion turned to politics, or really, pronouncements on Austria’s struggles as a country; the ever-present threat of Hitler’s goose-stepping Wehrmacht, usually followed by lamenting the many pro-Nazi supporters in Salzburg and, indeed, all of Austria.

  “The difficulty,” Heinrich Schmidt stated, “is that too many people today confuse our Germanic culture with being German. We are not Germans. We are Austrians!”

  “Yes, yes!”

  “You speak the truth, Herr Schmidt, the truth!”

  Several of the men pounded their fists on the table or the arm of their chair as Herr Schmidt sat back, pleased with his pronouncement.

  Restlessly Birgit shifted her position on the hard chair in the corner she’d been obliged to take in order to give the men, some of them grieved by old war injuries, the comfortable places on the sofas or armchairs. Lotte was perched on a footstool by her father’s knee, listening with a rapt expression to the men with their chesty coughs and trumpeting statements. Birgit didn’t know how she did it—how could she possibly be interested in what a bunch of grizzled old men who smelled of tobacco and pine liniment had to say? Especially as they said it every month, year upon year, and even more so since the Fatherland Front had come to power.

  Johanna, at least, had escaped to the kitchen, so she could help their mother bring out the coffees and cakes. As soon as they’d served everyone, Hedwig and Johanna had retreated back to the sanctum of their private space, drinking coffee in silent solidarity in the kitchen while Birgit continued to endure, unnoticed, invisible.

  She was used to being invisible. As the middle Eder sister, she possessed neither Johanna’s strength nor Lotte’s beauty. No one had ever told her so, but it was a fact so apparent she acknowledged it every time she looked in the mirror. Like her sisters, her hair was blond and her eyes were blue, but there the resemblance ended.

  While Johanna’s strong lines and firm jaw made her so striking, and Lotte’s porcelain complexion and rosebud mouth made her look delicate and lovely, Birgit had a face like a potato. Sometimes, in her bleaker moods, she thought God must have taken up the leftovers from making Johanna’s character and Lotte’s loveliness and put her together out of the scraps.

  Her hair was the color of dirty snow, her complexion not much better. Although her eyes were blue, they were small, “like raisins in a pudding,” as one girl at the convent school had said with gleeful unkindness. Her expression, when she wasn’t sm
iling, looked so dour that strangers in the street had told her “to stop looking so gloomy—you’ve got a face to sour milk!”

  Birgit didn’t mean to look gloomy, but she feared when she smiled she looked manic and desperate. There was no winning.

  Her talents had not fared much better than her looks. “Birgit is remarkably undistinguished” one of the nuns at school had stated with a sorrowful shake of her head. She’d been competent enough in the necessary bits—reading, writing, arithmetic, history—but nothing had ever fired her imagination and she’d never, ever had cause to stand out. She’d never been picked for running races or playing sport, never been the solo or starring role in the Christmas concerts or Easter plays. Like Johanna, she could carry a tune, but next to Lotte’s clear, lark-like voice, her own singing was, as with so much else, merely competent and certainly unremarkable.

  Sandwiched between two sisters, both of whom stood out in their own individual ways, Birgit had realized at a young age that she would have to work hard to make her mark in any way at all. And so, when she was eight years old, watching her father repair an ormolu mantel clock, she had decided she would be good at what he was—clockmaking.

  The trade did not come easily to her, fiddling with so many tiny, disparate parts was complicated and intricate, and it was only because of her determined interest that her father allowed her to informally apprentice him when she was sixteen. It had taken much study and concentration to understand how the gears and wheels worked together, in perfect balance and exquisite harmony; how the energy in the spring was released to turn the wheels and then with their push of the pendulum, gravity kept its steady swing and the hands of the clock ticked out the time.